New Jersey Democrats Ignore Their Own Corruption. My Friend's Jazz Club In Montreal.

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Now that illegal immigration has reared its head again and is obviously being financed by Soros and Speyer types, if not actually by them, it is time to resurrect this video of Schumer hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, Texas Democrats ask noncitizens to register to vote.

And:

Democrats rail against Republicans misdeeds yet, somehow willingly overlook their own corruption  in New Jersey and , as usual, are ably assisted in their hypocrisy by their mass media friends. (See 3 below.)
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Is Trump getting serious about attacking our deficits? (See 1 below.)

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If anyone is going to Montreal my friend has opened a great Jazz Club. Just use my name: 

http://www.lefrenchquarter.com
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If you do not believe The Saudis then you probably have to believe the Turks.  Where does that leave you? (See 2 below.)
Dick
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1) President Trump Calls for Small Government

In a cabinet meeting, President Trump has called on his secretaries to propose cuts to their own budgets. Breitbart reports:

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he would ask each member of his cabinet to cut five percent from their annual agency budgets.

“We’re going to ask every Secretary to cut five percent for next year,” Trump said.

 The president spoke to his cabinet members during a meeting at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, noting that some agencies could cut more than five percent.

“Get rid of the fat, get rid of the waste,” he said.

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2) The Secret History Of The Saudi Consulate Affair: Turkey's Counter-Attack

Melik KaylanContributor

Almost everything we know about what actually happened in the Saudi Consulate comes from the Turks. Make that everything we know. And make that what we think we know. One thing is certain at this point. The US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Kashoggi is dead. The rest, down to how long it took for the Saudi executioners to kill him – seven minutes – we have from Turkish sources. Now ask yourself – why are the Turks so determined to be so informative? The regime in Ankara is hardly a champion of human rights for journalists. Hardly a paragon of selfless transparency in its own conduct toward dissidents.

It's endlessly astonishing how the global news media can generate such a mountain of noise over a particular topic without once asking the most obvious, the most germane questions. What are the Turks up to? What's the game here? They've managed to endure years of foreign nationals being executed on Turkish soil – from Chechen resistance fighters to Syrian opposition activists – without going soft and raising a rucus. Suddenly they care about a Saudi activist disappearing inside what is effectively Saudi territory under international law. Of course they should be outraged. But for them to develop a sensitive heart suddenly over this one outrage suggests other calculations afoot.

Two vectors converge in their calculations, perhaps three. Kashoggi was a Muslim Brotherhood advocate. President Erdogan famouslyso. The Saudis, not so much. Muslim Brotherhood principles center on taking power via elections (and then forever bending democracy to keep power). The Saudis, being Islamic originalists, consider elections impious because in the beginning at the dawn of Islam no such system existed. Plus, a free vote in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) might one day unseat the Ibn Saud family. The Saudis support Egypt's military-dominated state for suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood. Erdogan hates that model, fears its return in Turkey, because the Turkish military are his traditional nemesis. Furthermore, when the Gulf states led by KSA tried to impose a blockade on Qatar, the Turks intervened to break it and signed a deal to house a Turkish military base there.

Essentially, Ankara and Riyadh are jockeying for leadership of the Sunni Muslim world. President Erdogan as a Neo-Ottomanist wants Turkey to act as the fons et origo of legitimate Islam in the old imperial way. KSA harbors its own pretensions backed by oil billions. Beyond that, the Saudis (along with Israel and Donald Trump) are focused above all on resisting Iranian influence in the region. Turkey refuses to stop trading with Iran, especially in the area of oil. So the Turks have ample reason to use the death of Kashoggi as an instrument in the face-off with Saudi.

But the Turks have one more, ultra-pivotal, reason to make a cause celebre out of Kashoggi's death. Perhaps the main reason. And it has to do with the U.S. Follow this closely. First let me give you the simpler version and if you're a true geo-strategy nerd you can lap up the finer details further down. Broadly, when Donald Trump imposed sanctions on Turkey for detaining the evangelist Andrew Brunson, the Turkish Lira lost some forty percent of value (to date). White House to Erdogan: we have any number of methods by which to wobble your power over Turkey. Chief among them, we can wreck your economy.
So the Turks released Brunson, but on the same day they started to leak the details of Kashoggi's disappearance. Ankara to the White House: we can wreck your economy too, watch this. To the tune of (in President Trump's estimate) losing $100 billion worth of Saudi money in the U.S economy. Because, at some point the U.S may be forced to disinvest from Saudi petro-dollars owing to the popular revulsion against KSA brutality. And since that first day Ankara has kept up the drip, drip, drip of harrowing details. In effect, the Turks have counterattacked the White House. The threat is aimed not merely at the US economy, at Donald Trump's securest claim on broad-based support, but also on the global sway of the dollar as the reserve currency underpinned by petro-dollars.

For the detail nerds, the story goes back to the late Obama era when U.S officials arrested visiting Turco-Iranian citizen Reza Zarrab in March, 2016, for helping Iran bypass economic sanctions via Turkey's Halkbank where he once worked at the height of the sanctions regime. He was accused of working to benefit Ministers in Erdogan's inner circle of government. Zarrab pled guilty on various counts and turned states' evidence. I wrote about it when the case finally came to trial in New York in the Trump era. The judge allowed certain documents to be admitted into the record. Which certified them as genuine. The documents included phone-taps of Erdogan, back when he was Prime Minister, telling his son to stash away millions of Euros around their house. Those recordings had already leaked in Turkey but Erdogan claimed they were fake and went on to win several elections.

In short, the U.S. has been building pressure on Erdogan from several angles for some time, not least with evidence against corruption around him. Ultimately, the Zarrab case set up legal conditions for Magnitsky-like sanctions against Erdogan's confidantes, and indeed his family members. The Turks, in anticipation, arrested Evangelist Andrew Brunson really as a pawn in the game. He suffered detention for two years. Trump then imposed sanctions to get him released. Ankara riposted and played the Kashoggi card by revealing alleged details of the journalist's demise in the Saudi consulate. Since all of these moves betray a process of careful planning on both sides, one wonders if the Turks knew ahead of time about Kashoggi's intended visit to the Consulate and what lay in wait for him there.

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3) Smiling at Corruption

Democrats try to save Bob Menendez months after his bipartisan admonishment.

By Kimberley A . Strassel

Democrats have failed all year to find a cogent midterm campaign theme, but one appears to be attaching to them all the same: Listen to what we say; ignore what we do.

Nowhere is this truer than in blue, blue New Jersey, where Sen. Bob Menendez is suddenly struggling. Businessman and Republican nominee Bob Hugin has spent months educating Garden State voters on Mr. Menendez’s adventures with a now-convicted criminal. The more the voters learn, the tighter the race becomes. Recent public polls have awarded Mr. Menendez a 6- or 7-point lead, though a new internal Hugin poll claims the gap is now less than 2.

Democrats are alarmed enough that the Senate Majority PAC this week decided to reroute a precious $3 million to bolster Mr. Menendez with television advertising. The decision is extraordinary, given the number of Senate seats Democrats are already struggling to defend, many in states President Trump carried. But it is even more extraordinary for the statement—campaign theme, if you will—Democrats are rolling out with this ad buy. Namely, don’t believe us.

This is the party that claims to be running against a Republican “culture of corruption.” Democrats have highlighted the conviction of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and introduced anticorruption bills in Congress. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in August even provided her members a “toolkit” for talking about supposed GOP misdeeds. They present the Trump White House as some mix of the yakuza and a drug cartel.

Yet here Democrats are intervening on behalf of the one federal lawmaker to have been definitively judged by his peers as corrupt in recent years—to have abused his office, to have scorned ethics rules, to have brought “discredit” on the Senate. A bipartisan letter from the Senate Ethics Committee in April “severely admonished” Mr. Menendez, finding that for six years he had “knowingly and repeatedly accepted gifts of significant value” from his close friend and Democratic Party donor, Florida ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen. The gifts included luxury private-plane flights, soirees in Paris hotels, and free accommodation at a Dominican Republican villa—where Mr. Menendez stayed not once or twice but 19 times.

Throughout this, Mr. Menendez just happened to be advancing Dr. Melgen’s business interests in Washington—lobbying a cabinet official over a Medicare billing dispute, and supporting visa applications for Dr. Melgen’s overseas girlfriends. Some people might call this a quid pro quo, and federal prosecutors did, obtaining an indictment against Mr. Menendez in 2015. The charges were dropped after the Supreme Court tightened the standards on proving such cases. Dr. Melgen, however, was convicted last year of Medicare fraud and has been sentenced to 17 years in federal prison.

One last poignant detail to add to this Democratic theme of anti-anticorruption: The 2015 Menendez indictment noted that in 2012 a fundraiser for a powerful Democratic political outfit accepted two $300,000 contributions from Dr. Melgen’s company, and then earmarked them for Mr. Menendez’s re-election that year. The political outfit? The Senate Majority PAC, the group spending millions to now rescue Mr. Menendez.

Political spending aside, Mr. Menendez’s Democratic colleagues have also shown they are more than happy to tolerate corruption in their own ranks—at least if it means one more Senate seat. After the feds dropped charges, Democrats allowed Mr. Menendez to regain his position as ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They permitted him to keep that job even after the Ethics Committee issued its four-page letter admonishing Mr. Menendez.

Following the federal indictment, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer lauded Mr. Menendez as “one of the best legislators in the Senate.” Fellow New Jerseyite Sen. Cory Booker offered his unabashed support even after the Senate admonishment. The Garden State’s Democratic establishment squeezed out the only declared primary challenger to Mr. Menendez, Michael Starr Hopkins, who failed to raise any real money from any Democratic power brokers. Those scions instead all endorsed Mr. Menendez for re-election.

The Hugin campaign dropped another tough ad this past week, referencing a 2015 federal court filing that states the government had been “presented with specific, corroborated allegations that defendants Menendez and Melgen had sex with underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic.” Mr. Menendez strenuously denies that. It is nonetheless remarkable to watch Democrats and their media allies close ranks to insist there is a soaring standard of proof for such serious claims. This in light of their uncorroborated claims against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, as well as Mr. Mendendez’s own moralizing complaints that we live in a world in which a woman can “speak truth to power about a sexual assault,” but “they will not believe you.”

And with that, we are back again to Democrats’ 2018 theme. You can listen to what they say. Or you can believe your own non-lying eyes.

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